Sunday, 25 November 2012

I could've been a rich man...

Have you heard about that 17 year old boy from England who
created a news app for smart phones called Summly? It’s pretty old news but I
was going to blog about it before but I forgot. His idea has attracted over 1 Million
pounds in investment to date from various people including Rupert Murdoch. You
may not believe me but I came up with a very similar idea so if I had followed
it up, perhaps I would be rolling in the money living the high life instead of
being a poor student. I need to find my GCSE media work to prove it but I might
aswell explain my concept seems as it has now already been done.

Like Nick D’Aloisio (Summly founder), I recognised that
newspapers need to incorporate technology to attract young people because most
(not me) don’t buy traditional print copies. This is mostly because in the
modern internet age, where news is instant, people have less time and don’t
want to read long articles. I therefore proposed an iTunes style online paper
where the headlines and a brief summary were available for free (like Summly).
Then you could purchase the full article for something like 10p. And columns
from celebrities could be 20p.

After speaking to friends and family a few years ago, they
said it wouldn’t work because you can just go and buy the whole newspaper for
20p. But D’Aloisio has proved them wrong and I regret not at least pitching my
idea to an investor. So, the moral of the story is to follow your instincts
even if you could fail and don’t regret decisions. It’s cliché but true.

Busy week ahead so I’ll try to blog but if not, you may have
to wait until Thursday.